Right Thinking from the Left Coast

The Latest Triumph of Obamanomics

You remember the “Summer of Recovery”? That was back in 2010 when the combination of fiscal stimulus and Obama frisson was supposed to get the economy moving again. Since then, we’ve been waiting and waiting for a full recovery, bumbling along at 2% growth with job creation barely keeping up with population. But I’m sure an economic boom is just around …

The Commerce Department said on Thursday that the nation’s overall output shrank at an annual rate of 1 percent in the first three months of the year, revising downward its initial estimate from late April, which showed a very slight gain for the period. It is the first quarter in three years in which the nation’s output of goods and services has contracted.

The figures are bad news for the White House as well as for Democrats running for Congress in November’s midterm elections. Although there’s still time for growth to rebound before then — and recent data on hiring has been more encouraging — little room remains on the runway for an economic takeoff this year.

This is being blamed on the unusually cold winter. That’s not a ridiculous explanation but it’s not enough to explain everything. Gross Domestic Income fell a whopping 2.3% which could indicate that further revisions will be even worse.

It has been six years since the financial crisis. Federal government spending is still around 21 percent of GDP, up from 19 percent in 2007, and the Federal Reserve still has a very expansive monetary policy. Under those circumstances, a quarter of negative growth is pretty unsettling.

Exactly. The “austerity” we’ve enjoyed has been a huge increase in FY2009 followed by flat spending. It has included a massive quantitative easement from the Fed. You simply can not look at all that and call it austerity, no matter how much Paul Krugman stamps his foot.